Jorge Luis Borges—whose writing can often appear so geometrically perfect that it seems more like girih or to have emanated from a non-human, maybe angelic, source—said, in his 1977 lecture, “Blindness,” that he had “always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” He discussed the grand irony of being placed in charge of the National Library of Argentina the same year he lost most of his sight.
“There I was,” Borges noted with his usual introspective humor, “the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.”
Of course, he composed a poem about it, the “Poem of the Gifts,” the beginning of which he quoted in the lecture: “No one should read self-pity or reproach/ into this statement of the majesty/ of God; who with such splendid irony/ granted me books and blindness at one touch.”
For Borges, the two “gifts” contradicted each other and therefore seemed to present a threshold or a crossroads, evoking his “Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the garden functions as a nexus of shifting realities: “It seemed to me that the dew damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people.” And what is that if not a library to a blind man?
In “Blindness,” he added that this ironic crossroads brought intellectual as well as physical uncertainties to his life:
There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposophy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when something ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will gain. We have a very precise image—an image at times shameless—of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
Much like the Death card in the tarot, which isn’t so much about death as transformation, Steiner’s anthroposophical ending-beginning is only possible if one assumes an a priori mover, an ur-cause from which all paths may fork, terminate, and fork again. Borges was a Christian and so this wasn’t an issue for him. Still, nobody likes getting the Death card. The querent would always rather make something of the other cards on the table, “for we only know what we have lost” and, even for the devout, tomorrow is only a vision, usually an unpleasant one.
With these thoughts in mind, I (with fairly good vision and being unworthy of any sort of comparison with Borges) recently entered a position at a prestigious library. Or maybe it is only prestigious to me, given the reductive materialism which seems to have become more viral than ever with the rise of artificial intelligence.
These days, people are less likely to see a garden of forking potentials, filled with invisible people, and would probably shake their heads at what seems like an unhygienic warehouse for carbon-based data storage. As an elderly gentleman said to me yesterday without a hint of sarcasm, “Books are obsolete, you know.” I told him I know. Or, at least, I know that’s what a lot of people believe. But I added that I don’t believe it.
“Some of the best things in life are obsolete,” I said.
Then he grinned. “Like me!”
He’d just turned 80. I wished him a happy birthday and he whistled out the door. Maybe, in that moment, he felt there was something to libraries after all. But I’m not sure yet what it means to work in a library eight hours a day, five days a week. In an abstract way, I also feel a bit blind.
Borges reached the end of his lecture by characterizing his threshold of blindness, his crossroads of forking changes, as an opportunity to know himself in a new way, to adopt a new way of life, and “think that something begins.”
He observed that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it.”
This feels true. But the truth of what “it” entails, the nature of “everything that happens,” remains as mysterious as an unread, even an unreadable, book. Now I find myself surrounded by books I haven’t opened and invisible people I mostly haven’t met. What has ended in my life? What has just begun? And who will I meet next?